Jolidrive is Close to My Holy Grail Web Service

byJames FurbushonMarch 20, 2013

Jolidrive allows you to access all your content from across multiple cloud services, including Dropbox, SkyDrive, Box, Flickr, SoundCloud, YouTube, etc. with one login.

It’s impressive for a free service and clearly designed from an iPad-centric ethos using HTML5. The service is free, but I would gladly pay the developers $5 a month if/when they build out the feature set of this promising platform.

As of right now, the service offers a way to aggregate content from across multiple services. But, you can’t really do anything with it. If you open a document within Jolidrive, it kicks you over to the native service hosting that content. Further, there are lots of apps — like Evernote — that you can’t connect and are actually just links to the service’s site.

That’s a shame.

Features I’d love to see them build out would be a truly consumer-friendly single-sign on service with a bit of security baked in. I would love to not only access my documents but be able to move them from one service to another. For example, if my Dropbox account is nearing capacity but I have 30 GB of space available in Box, it would be nice to have the option of dragging and dropping files from one service to another.

Another feature that would benefit something like this would be editing documents within the Jolidrive dashboard and not having to leave the service to do so. But, this is an impeccably designed and thoughtful service, regardless.

Imagine if Google used a design like this for it’s various services? You login once to your Google account and then you can shuffle between email, documents, social, photos, whatever, with a sliding dashboard on the side? That would be incredible. If I were Google, I’d buy Jolidrive for the design talent and work to have this be the next iteration of the Google Apps/Chrome OS platform.

Update: As it turns out, Jolidrive is based on the Jolicloud OS from a team in Paris. The intent of the Jolicloud OS was to offer an open source operating system users could install onto netbooks and old laptops to breath new life into them. It’s not dissimilar in theory from Chrome OS, but it is certainly a much slicker design.

I still stand by my original points. Promising, but not entirely all the way there for my needs or wants yet. [via swissmiss]